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30 Blu-ray Discs In a 1.5TB MiniDisc-Like Cassette
MrSeb writes "Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time — MiniDisc and Zip disks — Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette, which will have a capacity of between 300GB and 1.5TB. As far as I can tell, the main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. What is the use case for these 1.5TB MiniDiscs, though? In terms of pure storage capacity, tape drives are still far superior (you can store up to 5TB on a tape!) In terms of speed and flexibility, hard drives are better. If you're looking for ruggedness, flash-based storage is smaller, lighter, and can easily survive a dip in the ocean. The Optical Disc Archive might be good as extensible storage for TV PVRs, like TiVo and Sky+ — but as yet, we don't even know the cost of the system or the cassettes, and I doubt either will be cheap."
Does it have the XCP trojan installed by default? Will they sell you 5 tb and take four of them back with the first "upgrade"?
No, thanks. I'd rather use floppies than buy ANYTHING from Sony. I wish everyone else would stop shoveling money at these evil people as well. I doubt there's a less trustworthy entity on the planet.
Free Martian Whores!
Zip discs one of the most successful storage mediums of all time? Is that a joke?
Yes. And you didn't get it.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
From TFA:
"Unless Sony can get other companies to make and sell ODA drives, though, it will probably just go the way of the MiniDisc."
Hugely popular in Asia?
. .
Hear that woosh? That was the sarcasm going right over your head.
You lost me at "Sony".
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I think this is just Sony trying once again to replicate its success with the Compact Disc format. It has a long history of making new formats, just to see if they'll catch on. I'm sure it's quite lucrative if one does, but the other aspect of that is the proliferation of bizarre Sony formats that aren't even supported by Sony after some production period. How many versions of the Memory Stick did Sony wind up making? Six? Seven?
Anyway, this is just more of that and I'm sure it will fail and be forgotten soon enough.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Dear Slashdot Editors,
Please edit summaries before they hit the front page. For example, here is TFS with all the bullshit removed. I left the joke in for you, even though Sony didn't create Zip disks... Perhaps the poster meant Memory Stick, Betamax, Magic Gate or one of the other custom Sony formats.
"Hot on the heels of the most successful storage mediums of all time â" MiniDisc and Zip disks â" Sony has announced the Optical Disc Archive, a system that seems to cram up to 30 Blu-ray discs into a single, one-inch-thick plastic cassette, which will have a capacity of between 300GB and 1.5TB. The main selling point of the Optical Disc Archive is, just like MiniDisc, the ruggedness of the cassettes. Optical discs themselves are fairly resistant to changes in temperature and humidity, and the cassettes are dust and water resistant. The article is light on potential uses."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
From TFA:
"Unless Sony can get other companies to make and sell ODA drives, though, it will probably just go the way of the MiniDisc."
Hugely popular in Asia?
This is true. Got rid of my father's minidisc hardware and discs, all to .jp and local asian sounding names. Crazy popular little things over there, locally no one wants them.
Somehow, I was never quite certain how, their encoding and/or internal design was so much more energy efficient than early mp3 players, that you'd get like 4 times the playtime, despite the storage technology being a rotating disk.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Ah, the click of death... especially impressive when a bad Zip disk could misalign the drive heads badly enough to screw up any other disks inserted. Probably the first widespread example of a computer *hardware* virus...
Every business that needed to store anything over 5MB had a Zip drive. and that's every business I consulted for in the late 90s.
So maybe not every desktop but every office or 1 out of 5 computers had them.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Why does Sony keep coming out with "Storage solutions", when the other arm of Sony doesn't want us to save *anything*?
I mean, come on Sony... have you ever considered that those evil pirates are downloading your music/movies because you're giving them the tech to save a billion terrabytes of stuff? What do you think they are going to fill up all that space with?
If computers were only 16mb of ram and a 40mb hard drive, they couldn't save a 4gb movie, now could they? Come-on man, think!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Back before USB flash drives were widely and cheaply available, the only way to easily move around more than a few floppy's worth of data was the Zip drive.
100 MB was a lot back then. Even though the drive itself was not ubiquitous, the parallel port model could be easily transported, and it was supported on multiple operating systems. Macs were supported with SCSI. In some institutional environments, you'd find internal IDE zip drives. My local library branch had computers with internal drives, and for a few years it was the primary way I was able to download anything more than about 20 MB off the internet (hi-speed internet unavailable at home).
CD writers were expensive (my original 2X writer was $300), and came with all the problems of read-only media. Of course Zip had its problems - the drive itself wasn't very cheap, nor the disks, and of course there was the click of death... but all in all, it was IMO the most versatile portable storage medium we had between floppy disks and USB flash drives. Lugging around an IDE drive and opening up whatever you wanted to attach it to wasn't always an option :-)
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Sounds crazy, but ZIP disks offered two other advantages:
1: The ability to be set read-only with a password. This was useful back in the day if one wanted a FTP server that an intruder couldn't trash the distributed files on, especially if a SCSI ZIP drive was used which had decent performance at the time.
2: The ability to use a password for protecting data which was hardware enforced. The ZIP 100 was bypassable by the hardware sleep trick, but the ZIP 250 and 750 were not, so other than LEOs with drives which ignored that bit, it was a pretty secure mechanism, especially when combined with a backup utility that did encryption.
ZIP drives were useful... of course, their time is since long gone since a USB flash drive is far more reliable and cheaper for small capacities.